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October 7, 2007
Introduction to Beijing
I’ve been in Beijing since the end of August, so my first blog post comes sprinkled with a month’s worth of experience living in Beijing and traveling greater China. There is a lot of ground to cover from the past month, but I will start with initial impressions of Beijing. My perspective of the city in my first days and weeks is a bit skewed, in that this is my second time ever traveling to the capital city. This does not qualify me as a Beijing expert, but it does mean that prior to studying abroad here I had already gone through the very initial shock and awe of the city, both the good and bad (the bad: the overwhelming urban sprawl, choking pollution, and overpopulation, and the good: daily exposure to how the world’s most vibrant economy runs, excellent - and cheap! – food, and tremendous opportunities to visit and experience sites of cultural and historic importance, among other things).
Visiting a country is one thing, but staying and living there is an entirely different experience. Thus, the purpose of this post today – and the reoccurring theme of this entire blog – is to chart my experiences abroad in Beijing, and reflect upon what I observe in terms of the people, culture, political climate, social norms, and the like. In doing so, my goal is simple: to describe and comment on what daily life Beijing is like for all interested audiences, including those students thinking about studying abroad here.
Having said that, let the stories and recounts begin! I started the IES Beijing Language Intensive Program confident of the culture to which I was to be exposed to in China. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I wasn’t nervous. I had my doubts about everything from getting homesick to how I would handle speaking Chinese far more frequently than I ever had before. Still, I thought I had Chinese culture down. After all, I’m half Chinese! My mom is from Taiwan, she spoke Chinese to me growing up, taught me how to use chopsticks at an early age, and come on – I’ve been to both China and Taiwan before so piece of cake, right? Although it hasn’t hit me until now, my opinion has since changed. The first few weeks for me really become a lesson in learning how little I know about China, culturally and otherwise.
Tiananmen Square
As a precursor to discussing culture, I feel like I have to acknowledge the fact that Beijing is really its own animal, and I don’t say that in a negative way. It’s just that the city is enormous, but not in the way one might expect from one of the largest and most populated cities in the world. Beijing, both a city and a province, has 14 million people, second in China behind Shanghai in terms of population. Unlike Shanghai, though, or other big cities outside of China (think London, New York, Chicago), there really is no “downtown” Beijing. Instead, Beijing is more like Houston, Texas in that there really is no skyline, and everything is incredibly spread out. This can be explained in part by how Beijing was constructed as a city. Most large cities have roads leading directly from the suburbs to the city outskirts, then into the city and eventually downtown; Beijing, on the other hand, is built upon five “rings” of road that encircle the city from the inside out. The starting point is the Forbidden City, where Tiananmen Square is, and the rings progress from one to five, with each proceeding ring successively larger than the last, making the Fifth Ring Road the largest and farthest removed from the (cultural) heart of Beijing (see this map) for a good map of the city layout). The absence of a downtown skyline does not make Beijing any less dynamic a city – rather, it’s quite the opposite. However, one does not get the same sense of definition and centrality in standing at any given point in Beijing as opposed to, say, standing in the middle of Manhattan and seeing tall skyscrapers everywhere.
While I find the architecture and layout of Beijing to be fascinating in and of itself, the greater point of describing some of the urban layout is to show how truly different Beijing is as a whole in comparison to most of anything I’ve ever seen in the United States. Specifically the culture, which I thought knew before, applies to the previous sentence. One observation I’ve given some thought to lately is how relationships and personal space – whether through friends, boyfriends/girlfriends, and family - are expressed publicly. I’ve already established that Beijing is, well, freaking huge, and that it has a lot of people. One common misconception deduced from this fact is that people here easily get caught up in the hustle and bustle of city life, and for many life is without a lot of personal interaction and for some just plain lonely. This belief is consistent with the school of thought held by many in the United States (including myself at one time) that Chinese people are naturally not as emotional, and tend to mask their feelings when in public.
Maybe it’s just because I live near a big public university and am therefore surrounded by young people every day, but my experiences in walking through the streets tell a different story. No one here walks alone! As with any generalization, there are exceptions: I do see people strolling down a street sans a companion, and this is socially acceptable. However, the vast majority of people are with company. Young people, especially women, love to walk hand-in-hand or with interlocked arms, animatedly talking about their days or exchanging jokes. For many westerners, this unabashed public closeness between people of the same sex may seem odd at first, and I found that I couldn’t help but stare on more than one occasion. To a greater point, though, the “group walking” found in Beijing, whether in pairs, trios, or octets is no new phenomenon in the United States. I contend, however that a lot of the group walking observed in the states occurs in the suburbs, in neighborhoods, and less so in cities. For example, this summer I interned for a company in downtown Chicago, and would see hordes of people walking down the street and crossing intersections in tight packs. Upon closer inspection, though, I would note that many in the packs were walking alone, and that their close proximity to one another was not by choice but necessity. Most people seemed to carry neither interest nor awareness of the people around them, walking with a sense of urgency to get from point A to point B. Beijing also has this sort of lone wolf walking, but for a city much larger than Chicago, it’s surprising to see that Beijing also ostensibly demonstrates more camaraderie amongst its pedestrian crowds. Even late into the evening the streets are alive with people walking together – families, classmates, friends – chatting away, some even sharing food purchased from a street vendor as they walk. I often make a trek on foot of about two miles from my homestay to a gym for an evening workout, and I always see people walking together, especially students. The sight gives me a much warmer impression of Beijing than I first expected, though the trend itself was not something I realized until a couple weeks ago. The overall point of this observation is that Beijing continues to remind me each day of how much I still have to learn with respect to culture and everything else this country has to offer.
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October 16, 2007
Reflection on the Home Stay Family Experience
One of my greatest concerns going into this semester abroad in Beijing was the homestay experience. As you might guess, I was nervous about the matching process – would my initial impression of my family bode well for the future? – and I continuously wondered what I would do in the case that, heaven forbid, I wanted out of the experience.
My homestay family
Fast forward nearly two months later and I couldn’t be happier. I live with a married couple in their early fifties, and they have one child (like nearly every other family in China thanks to the one-child policy), a daughter, who is a student at Shanghai Normal University. My family lives in a modest, but comfortable apartment quite typical of a middle-class family in the Beijing area. I couldn’t ask for a better location, as I am within a five-minute walk of Beijing Waiguoyu Da Xue (“Bei Wai”, also known as Beijing Foreign Studies University), where I have all my classes. Probably more important, though, is the close proximity of my homestay to street vendors and tasty restaurants. I walk out the door and I have all the Chinese (and Korean!) dishes I want at my disposal. This, I will deeply miss when I leave.
But back to the main story: my homestay experience. It really is amazing how much of a difference it makes living in the home of a family. For starters, you gain so much perspective. I recently realized that over the past month I have subconsciously taken in and even adapted to many intricacies in Chinese culture (more on this in a later post). Regarding culture, in one respect my family embodies the paragon of family life in China, but also simultaneously serves as an example of how, like in the United States, no two families are the same. What makes my family seem like many others in Beijing are largely the superficial qualities. As a whole, my homestay parents tend to lead quiet, respectable lives. Both work as engineers in publicly owned companies, and they are very experienced at what they do. My “aunt and uncle” (as I call them) love to take walks in parks on the weekend, and whenever they do laundry they air-dry their clothes (no dryer used – I too now wash my clothes this way). Outside of work they don’t, at least on the surface, do a whole lot. Reading, watching TV, having long conversations over a home-cooked meal are all daily occurrences.
So, that’s more of an exterior outlook on the family and in many respects it is an accurate representation of how they live. However, when I started getting more curious (and both courageous and attentive), I saw that there was far more to the eye than this tranquil lifestyle. My most lurching moment was actually last night, as I sat with my parents over a lovely dinner of river crab (second time we’ve had it this week! Fortunately for me it’s crab season here). Conversation, though I’ve found sometimes stalled due to language deficiencies - on both my part and theirs – and cultural differences (in general Chinese people seem far more comfortable with what many Americans would call “awkward silence”), is really not hard to come by at the dinner table. I think this has a lot to do with the personalities of both my home stay family, as they are more outgoing and talkative than many others I have met, and myself, a self-proclaimed extrovert. Therefore, our dispositions naturally compliment one another so it all usually works out in the end.
 So here we are eating crab and talking about differences between American and Chinese culture, as we so often do (as an aside, I’ve found that as great of an interest as I have in learning about China, my family has as equal if not even greater and more insatiable desire to learn of American life). We get on the subject of serving portions during meals because we’re eating crab, and if you’ve ever had any sort of crab freshly cooked and from the shell, you know that it can be a tricky and involved process to finagle the meat from the shell and that the result on your plate is often a meager amount. Well, my aunt made a comment about how this meal was fitting because meat in general was hard to come by for both her and my uncle growing up. She said they would never dream of eating crab as a child. I was immediately interested in her comment, and in the back of my mind I made the connection of the time period that was their childhood and adolescence, the 1960s. As many know, the 1960s were an incredibly volatile time for anyone living in China, which was reeling from the after-effects of The Great Leap Forward (1958), and in the process of beginning the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Remembering that both my homestay parents grew up during the Cultural Revolution and for the first time acting upon this realization, I carefully began asking questions about their respective experiences. What I heard in return was such a fascinating, almost unbelievable account of life back in the days of Chairman Mao and the “re-education” of millions in the countryside. Being a history major, I had learned of the Cultural Revolution and its disastrous and ghastly outcomes (these are of course my words and not those of my homestay family), but never had I been able to put a personal face with the story.
My uncle told me that he spent two years working in the fields of Beijing’s countryside, picking apples and planting other crops. Like millions of others, he had come of age in the eyes of the Chinese government, and had no say in the matter. Every morning he would wake up “as the sun would rise”, as he put it, and work all day before returning home and sleeping by 9 PM due to the early wake-up the next day demanded of him. I asked if he liked what he did, and he basically said, respectfully of course, that my question was irrelevant. I knew what he meant by that and was prepared for such a response, but I wanted to learn more so I pursued the question. As a follow-up, I asked him if he would personally have chosen such a lifestyle if given an opportunity to choose for himself. Again, he avoided answering my question by saying that the choice was not for him to make. I then repeated my question, reiterating the hypothetical nature of it and placing emphasis on the personal choice aspect. It was then that he fully understood the true nature of my question, and he responded, “No, I would not have chosen that lifestyle.”
Fortunately for both my uncle and aunt, they were born in the late 1950s, around the time of the Great Leap Forward, so they did not have to spend much of their young adult life living under “that lifestyle”. Probably the most interesting fact I was reminded of in discussing the (in my opinion) inexhaustible topic of the Cultural Revolution was that there was essentially a whole generation of Chinese people – mostly 5-10 years older than my Beijing family – who missed out on an education as a result of the Cultural Revolution. Universities were closed, older and higher-paid professors were purged and labeled as “counterrevolutionaries”, and those who had already graduated from college were sent off to work in one of the many fields set aside for forced labor. As I said before, my parents consider themselves lucky because their higher education was only delayed a few years since they caught the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. However, those who spent nearly a decade in academic exile were not as fortunate, though the fact that they lived through the movement at all could be considered quite miraculous. What little form of education that existed for elementary and middle school aged children involved morning recitations and writings of the quotations of the Great Helmsman (Mao Zedong). It amazes me that to this day both of my homestay parents can recall in great detail many of the Communist Party songs and tributes to Mao and the glorification of China. When asked how they felt about the meaning behind these words, though, my parents provided a long pause before answering. They eventually said that while they now disagree with Mao’s methods, they were young at the time and knew no better than to follow along obediently and with great fervor.
As always, there is so much more to describe in this one part of one dinner conversation with my homestay family. This post presents just the tip of the iceberg in terms of a phenomenal experience that people call living in a home stay. My experience and perspective on the topic of home stays will continue to change, no doubt, though I am confident that my belief in its value and importance will remain strong. So, for those students who might be thinking about going abroad, look for programs that offer the chance to stay with a family and keep an open mind to the idea. You never know what experiences such an opportunity may bring you.
November 20, 2007
First Day of Work!
 Wednesday, September 5 marked the first day of my internship at the Beijing Lan Peng Law Firm located in Anhuili, Chaoyang District. As I had hoped, it was an eventful day to say the least, and it exposed me to at least one real world example of a day in the life of a lawyer in Beijing, along with the lives of those who assist in keeping a firm running smoothly. Mimi Lu, a second-year graduate student at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts University) was also there as a part of the IES intern-for-credit program. The two of us met in front of the West entrance of Bei Wai University, and from the start I knew that while the day could end up going in any number of directions, it would at least be a lively and interesting one. My morning grogginess quickly transformed into an acute awareness of my surroundings as we fought our way onto the already jam-packed 836 bus (as an aside: for anyone who has yet to fight their way onto a bus in Beijing, you’re missing out!). After a good amount of traffic, some hushed conversation with Mimi (5 seconds into our conversation the gentleman next to me promptly tapped me on the knee, flattened one hand horizontally in the air and moved it from shoulder-height to waist-height, an international and wordless sign to “pipe down!”), and a glimpse of the nearly finished Olympic Stadium - the “Bird’s Nest” as the locals call it - we hustled off the bus and arrived at our office. We of course only arrived after first walking 10 blocks in the opposite direction. You know China wouldn’t have it any other way.
Thankfully we ran into Kelly Zhao, the administrative executive at Lan Peng, at the entryway to the building and followed her inside. Now, I had the luxury of knowing what to expect because of a previous trip with Kang Laoshi, the IES Internship Coordinator, to “interview” with Qi-Huai Zhang, the Director Lawyer of the law firm. However, it may just as well have been my first time in the office because I was feeling some nerves. The lawyers who work in the front part of the office received us warmly, and soon we found ourselves sitting face to face with Mr. Zhang (Zhang Xiansheng) in his large, neatly decorated office. He dove right into the conversation, going through goals and expectations for the duration of our internship. He spoke to us in Chinese and his quick jumps from one point to another were hard to follow, due to my lack of fluency in Chinese. While intimidating, he also displayed a surprising sense of warmth. Based on his short speech to us, he seemed to be a man of high expectations and great efficiency, but also one who constantly challenges and motivates his staff.
We learned from Mr. Zhang that Mimi and I were each assigned to a lawyer to learn from and use as, if nothing else, a mentor. Both are young women in their mid-twenties, and I really like my “mentor”, Yu Wei. She graduated from Bei Da (Beijing University), an impressive feat on its own as the school is one of the toughest to gain entry to amidst the already fierce competition among young students in China. Yu Wei’s job at Lan Peng is her first since graduating from Bei Da. Her English is decent, but we mostly communicate in Chinese because she seems hesitant to use English in spite of her competency. (Side note: this trend, knowing English but being reluctant to speak it, is a common one in China that largely reflects the difference in teaching styles that exist between the United States and China. American language teachers tend to focus more on speaking skills, while Chinese language teachers place a much greater emphasis on reading and writing and the memorization of new words and phrases. For Chinese students, the latter learning environment makes them accustomed to demonstrating their fluency through nonverbal means. Due to the different teaching styles, Chinese students therefore tend to be less likely to speak English than native English speakers learning Chinese. Most Americans are accustomed to evaluating someone's language competency through the amount of dialog a person can have in the language being learned. However, since the concentration in Chinese education of foreign languages is not placed on spoken word, this commonly leads Americans to mistakenly assume Chinese students are unable to speak much, if at all. It's an interesting phenomenon to consider, and an even more fascinating one to witness firsthand.)
 Honestly, our first hour or two at the office was the most awkward part of the day. Here we had been greeted warmly by the Lan Peng staff, and immediately taken to see Mr. Zhang. I was surprised with the sense of priority our arrival was given, as Mr. Zhang didn’t have anything more important to do than meet with one-day-a-week interns. But as soon as “work” started, it was if the air was let of the room that held all my anticipation and excitement. We were brought to our desks and told we could work from them most of the time. They had wanted us to bring laptops, but both Mimi and I forgot so all we could do was promise to bring them the following week. After being shown to our desks (which were diagonal to one another), Yu Wei and Mimi’s teacher went back to their work and didn’t say anything to us. There was no, “Please start with this work,” or even, “Sorry, we don’t have much to do, but you can always make some copies for us”. Mimi and I later thought aloud that we would rather have been paper pushers for an hour than be idle.
Fortunately, however, things quickly improved thanks to some personal initiative. I asked what we could do to help out in any capacity, and that’s when we were taken over to a computer and shown the firm’s website: www.lawservice.cn. There we learned that Lan Peng keeps a blog up and running for its clients and partners. We read some basic information about the firm, such as when and how it started, what the firm does in terms of legal services (they really do everything here, from criminal cases and real estate disputes to prenuptial agreements and intellectual property cases), and who is a part of their operations.
From here, we were told that one project they wanted us to work on was to keep up with their blog and write replies in English to questions posted. While exciting, this task seemed and still seems daunting, as neither Mimi nor I have any applicable law education or experience, or anything else that would make us qualified to write responses like that. We eagerly told them we would try it out and mentioned our limited experience, but they didn’t seem to mind that fact. Our mentors also told us we would have an opportunity each week to sit in on meetings with clients, such as preparation for time spent in court.
Later in the afternoon, we were invited to observe an intellectual property case involving copyright infringement and potential unlawful production and references made to music from Beijing operas. While sort of a strange sounding case at first, it was fascinating to watch the meeting unfold between the plaintiffs (called “yuan gao”) and the lawyer, who was Yu Wei in this case. We got to hear firsthand the plaintiff’s side of the argument, an animated and colorful story about how they were wronged by another artist’s purposeful reproduction of a 1964 opera without consent from the composer, who sat directly to my left at the meeting. The funniest part of whole encounter was that this couple, the composer and who presumably was his wife, kept looking at me when explaining their predicament. They asked me if I agreed that reparations were necessary! I told them, in the best Chinese I could, that I thought at the very least they had a compelling case with enough evidence to justify taking it to court. Talk about a jolting experience, though! It made me want to start watching Law and Order in China, if there is such a thing.
There were many other events and highlights from the day – such as the other lawyers’ fascination with our American backgrounds and unabashed desired to practice English with native speakers such as myself. Also, I must not forget to leave out the 2-hour lunch Mr. Zhang treated us to that involved 15 people, more dishes than I can count, beer, and Mr. Zhang doing 95% of the talking at the table. These, and others, are things from both a professional and cultural standpoint I still need to think on more to fully grasp their meaning and significance.
All in all, it was a great first day interning. Towards the end of the day, Mimi and I started editing a page of the English version of Lan Peng’s website, and it felt great to actually start doing some real work. We met more people than I expected, mostly lower level lawyers. They were mostly all friendly and seemed to want to make us feel as comfortable as we could on our first day.
One thing I’ve taken away from the first day is that things are different across the board when it comes to interning in Beijing versus in the United States. Not only is there a language and cultural barrier, but also in being at a law firm there is entirely new terminology and methodology to learn. Becoming familiar with how the court system work and which laws are different from what I’m used to in the states are adjustments I will have to make over time. Still, there are still several similarities between American and Chinese offices. For example, the cubicle layout is also common, at least in this law firm. The chain of command, from the secretary all the way up to the senior partners, is quite evident here as well. In the end, though, it really is like being in another world. I look forward to going back next week, meeting even more people, and starting to better acclimate myself to the surroundings, jargon, rhythm and workflow of the office.
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